Most businesses are prepared for emergencies in one way or another – hardware and cloud backups of our work, security cameras installed, a first aid kit stored somewhere. But I’m pretty sure that completely avoiding human contact and locking teams out of the office wasn’t part of anyone’s business continuity plan until 2020.
Working from home against the backdrop of a global pandemic is a new experience for us too, but being creative in a distributed work environment isn’t. Thankfully, we didn’t need to rethink our processes from scratch, instead we’re fine-tuning things even further to remain connected, agile, and creative. Here’s how:
Staying agile from our home offices
Great ideas travel fast, and we need to be flexible to chase them, and strategise, produce, and distribute content very quickly. It’s just part of our culture, and one reason why we’ve long been a mobile-first studio: we deliver our creative projects from anywhere (and usually in the Cloud!)
Clients like the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) have long relied on us to help raise awareness and funds when there’s a humanitarian crisis somewhere in the world. Over six DEC appeals, we’ve moved our expertise and part of our team to the DEC HQ in London to create content for them on the fly. This year, when the DEC launched their Coronavirus Appeal, we worked from our living rooms, supporting the social campaign to help raise over £18M and save lives against the clock.
“The campaign is all about creating content quickly and reactively. We can be working on three different videos in one day, mixing footage with graphics and animation, which is quite a lot to do in a very short period of time,” says Louise King, our Executive Producer. “Normally, we’d be out and about with a crew, filming celebrities and contributors to endorse the appeal. This time, we recorded Google Meet calls, maximised user-generated content, and created new guidelines around filming remotely.”
To work effectively as an extension of the DEC without physically being there, we set up a Slack channel so we could exchange content and feedback with the DEC team in real time, throughout the entire process. We also put together a Google Sheet that both teams could feed into. It helped us all keep track of everything that was being produced and signed off in real time, which worked really well. “I’d say we managed to keep everyone safe without giving up our agility,” says Lou. “We delivered two weeks’ worth of content, including different versions of videos optimised for YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, and packages for broadcasters like the BBC and ITV, all without leaving our homes.”
Staying together while apart
As a close-knit team, even before COVID-19 we were used to tapping each other on the shoulder when we needed support. We also loved hosting impromptu (and pizza-driven) brainstorming sessions to help kick off creative ideas across our London and Singapore offices. As an agile studio that collaborates with freelancers from all over the world, and whose clients are based anywhere from California to Australia, technology has always been integral to our operations.
We’ve long relied on G Suite, Slack, and Asana to communicate and stay organised, so we already had all the tools we needed to work from home before lockdown started. Now, we’re working on a new balancing act: how to rely on technology 24/7 without making each other feel pressured to be “always on” and available?
“We have colleagues on child duty during work hours, and the emotional stress of this pandemic on the rest of us can’t be brushed aside either. So, part of staying emotionally connected during lockdown is recognising that, and cutting people some slack,” says our Account Director, Ella Roche.
To make it work, we have dedicated slots in our schedule for checking in on each other. There’s ‘Beer o’clock’ every Friday at 4:30pm, where we sit “together” on Google Meet with a drink, just like we would have done in the office. We also have a meeting every Monday, where the London and Singapore offices come together and enjoy an activity that energises us and helps us to start the week on the right foot. It doesn’t even have to be work-related. “One of my favourites so far was a virtual escape room,” shares Ella. “We deciphered ‘secret messages’ and played games for an hour before even thinking about work.”
Meanwhile, it’s great to have platforms like Asana where we can clearly see how work is progressing. We use Asana to maintain open communication on projects in progress, which gives each distiller ownership of their own tasks, and teams can see who might need support at any given stage of a project.
Slack is our go-to communication platform, because it’s the closest we get to being in the office: business-talk meets humour. In our #random channel, we share podcast recommendations (like distillery sessions!), interesting articles, or things that made us laugh. In #away, we can announce that we’re on lunch or popping out for milk, so team members know that we might take a little longer to answer a message. An added bonus of Slack is that we can pepper in emojis and GIFs, which are often easier to engage with emotionally than plain text, so it feels more like the type of chit-chat we’d have by the kitchen in the office.
Against all odds, one positive side effect of lockdown is that, in some ways, we’re getting to know each other even better. Our meetings now take place in each others’ kitchens and living rooms, and getting a glimpse of pets, bookshelves, house plants, and toys on video calls has made work feel, well, less like work. In a sense, even as COVID-19 continues to impact business, we’ve managed to stay agile and connected by bringing our whole selves to work, virtually.
